"The right answer is seldom as important as the right question."
--Kip Thorne
Kip Thorne came to Logan, Utah, last week to speak. Kip Thorne! The man who won the Albert Einstein Medal in 2009, and the Novel Prize in physics in 2017, and who acted as science consultant on the film Interstellar. I read his book, Black Holes & Time Warps, years ago and it blew my mind. So, last Thursday, I made the hour and a half drive north to Logan High School, from where Thorne graduated 60 years ago, to hear him give a lecture on "My Journey Through Space and Time: The Big Bang, Black Holes and Gravitational Waves." And it was awesome! He's funny, and good at explaining things, and so smart. He talked about his childhood and wanting to be a snow plow driver when he was seven, his college experiences at Cal Tech and Princeton, and his subsequent work on the LIGO detector, which detected the very first gravitational waves emitted from two colliding black holes on Sept. 14, 2015. Which led to him winning the Nobel Prize in 2017 along with Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish.
Best of all, not only did I get to meet him, I also got him to sign my copy of his book! It was so cool! It was my geek moment of the week. But really, how often do you get to meet an actual Nobel Prize winner?
So, if you're looking for a stellar read on black holes, check out Thorne's masterpiece. You might feel dumb at the start, but by the time you finish it, you'll feel really smart!
Here's a couple of other out-of-this-world books that I highly recommend:
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Happy Reading!
